in which she ponders the waning years of the american empire

i've been pondering this post for awhile. and although gwen recently wrote it far better than i can, i still have to weigh in...you see, when i visited the land of my birth this summer, after 3+ years away, i was a little shocked at the state of things.

i had expected to see signs of a depressed economy and they were there in the little things...more weeds in the cracks on the roads, flaking paint on the light poles, a general sort of lack of road maintenance. but they weren't there in ways i expected them to be. everyone (in the upper midwest, at least) is still driving around in the most ginormous, ugly, ungainly and badly-designed vehicles i've had the misfortune to see in, well, about three and a half years. when i saw the dodges on the road, i tell you, i understood why the company was in trouble (but i wondered why anyone bothered to bail them out, since they clearly had made such bad business/design decisions that they deserved to go under). i know i've said this before, but the vehicles seriously look like tanks thinly disguised as cars. who needs a vehicle that large and bulky? and who can afford to keep them filled with gas, as they must get absolutely rubbish mileage?  so clearly the crisis hasn't been bad enough to drive anyone to consider downsizing to a more gas-economical vehicle.

and on the subject of cars, one of my facebook friends was recently lamenting how sad it was to own two cars and have both of them in the shop. i commented that she could have stopped after the first part of the sentence - as it strikes me as quite sad to be one person, living alone, and have two cars. while i appreciate that a single person cannot drive both of the cars at once, it is still a monumentally arrogant act to think that you are entitled to two cars. what if everyone in india and china felt that way too?

case in point

at the first snack village (my nephew's name for those gas stations with a mini(?) market) we stopped in i was a little taken aback that there was an entire wall filled with your basic jesus-related t-shirts. and just when i had filled my 42 oz. beverage (i wanted a small one, you see) and recovered my shock at the jesus shirts, i wandered into the pop tart aisle. seriously, like 10 feet of a shelf  devoted entirely to pop tarts, swathed in brightly-colored packaging. which brings me to the next shocking thing. people had noticeably gained weight since i was last in the country.  like more than just a few pounds. of course i'm not a twig myself, so i don't mean to point fingers, but this was bad.

and it leads me back to the pop tarts and to all of that packaged, processed food in general, which i'm sure is directly responsible for people looking the way they do. it's so unhealthy. and good odin, the bread, don't even get me started on the bread - husband's eye actually twitched on one occasion while eating a slice of it. the sorriest excuse for bread in the world, in fact, it should be labeled like the cheese is in the US - as a processed, pasteurized bread product and not actual bread. and although i know that most of my readers (at least until after this post) are US-based and most of you are concerned about buying fresh, local produce if you possibly can, it's obvious that the vast majority of people haven't caught onto that. at all. and it's really worrying (unless of course you are a drug company that makes insulin or own quite a lot of stock in one #silver lining). no wonder the US has health care-related issues.

it amazed me how little the whole locovore concept has reached the area where i grew up - which is kind of ironic in that it's agricultural country. i had a conversation with my mother, where she was cussing out the locally-produced eggs available in the grocery store, as although they said "large," they weren't large at all in her eyes. she came home triumphant one day, happy that the store had gotten some imported-across-several-states "jumbo" eggs instead of those dreaded local ones. i asked her if she thought about food miles on those eggs and she looked at me blankly. which is weird because she is otherwise quite a fan of barbara kingsolver.

another worrying trend was the amount of religious fundamentalist billboards. so many that it actually began to seem menacing. somewhere south of sioux city, iowa on I-29, husband and i looked uneasily at one another as we passed a stark white billboard with somber black text reading, "are you ready to meet your god?" there was an exit coming up and we glanced at the children in the backseat, wondering if we'd have to somehow defend them from snipers, the billboard seemed so threatening.

now, having grown up in a town with 12 churches, i knew that there was a religiosity in the US, so i'm not saying that it's new, but it struck me that it's become so much more aggressive. it used to be ok to just quietly be your religion, but now it seems that you must display your christianity (because that seemed also to be the only option) much more visibly. of course, i also realize that freedom of religion is one of the basic tenets of what it means to be american. however, i'm not longer sure it would be ok to be a religion other than evangelical christian. not if you judge by the roadside advertising and the lit-up ticker-style signs on all the churches in every little town in the upper midwest. it's undoubtedly different on the coasts and in larger cities, but this is the heartland. and it's worth taking the pulse there to see what's really happening.

but perhaps the most shocking experience of all was listening to the "news." for one, there's scarcely any news it in anymore...just a poorly-argued string of predictions as to the demise of this or that politician or hollywood star. it seemed that there's no reporting on what actually happened or real analysis of it, but just a lot of shouting by heavily-made up, coiffed people who may at one time have been involved with the miss america pageant. at least in south dakota, on the local news they still talk about the weather, but even that is a bunch of more or less wild predictions. 

it seems to me that americans are expending an awful lot of energy and resources protecting themselves from "enemies" - behind strident religious slogans, in shouting news-free opinion casts, in tank-like vehicles and underneath layers of fat. and i find it really worrying. and sad. and wonder if it doesn't look an awful lot like the waning years of the holy roman empire, only with evangelical preachers, fox news and reality television.

an interview with gwen of not really (the final interview - for now)

i think that gwen's is the perfect interview to end my interview series (for now)...she's funny, she swears (kind of a lot), she's smart, erudite, she mentions sartre,  and i think i might be a little bit in love with her on some level that's probably neither healthy nor something we want to delve too deeply into. and i think her answers have given me a push back to my bloggy self...read on and you'll see why:

1. what WOULD jesus do?

it's 7 am, i've been awake since 4, have spent the last 5 weeks traveling from one bed to another, packed and unpacked and packed again. what jesus SHOULD do is let me take a fucking nap.

no, really. i have to believe that nothing would horrify jesus more than the modern evangelical spectacle that bears his name. so much law. so little grace. i heard a high school classmate say once, glancing sideways at me, that if we could really see the world as god sees it, we would ache for the lostness of mankind. only someone who grew up in the tiny world of fundamental evangelical christianity might understand why i wanted to punch him in his fucking face after he said that. because the subtext is that he, this guy, can see the heart of mankind, too, can appreciate its lostness, can appreciate MY lostness, more than you and me, because he is closer to god. and if there's one thing i know after more than 40 years on this carousel, it's that i don't know one fucking thing about the secret hearts of others.  we are all mysteries, most especially to ourselves.

i think the most reprehensible aspect of modern evangelical christianity is its lack of love. of inclusiveness engendered by love. its proponents--the loud, public ones anyway--like to point to jesus in the temple, clearing out the corruption with his whip and his righteous anger, want to use that as a defense for their own judgments. but there are several things wrong with this position: first, these people are not, as far as i can tell, jesus. and they are the very people jesus--the guy who hung with the hookers and lepers and societal scrubs--would have taken his whip to.

what would jesus do? become a buddhist.

(for the record, most of the coolest people i know are the very ones who were raised by crazy christians. so. jesus must be up to something worthwhile, however inadvertently.)

2. when you want to run away, where you do go (and please don't say you actually run, because i might have to crush your skull)?

i go for a run. dude. i live in switzerland. it's kind of beautiful to run here.

hahahahaha.

i find a yoga class. that better?

i lose myself in a book, or in thinking about some esoteric concern. i write--loopy posts never to be published, long e-mails to my far-flung friends. i read a poem again and again. i wander through one of zurich's art museum. i bake. i plan my next (theoretical) vacation (turkey, stay alive, no matter what occurs. i will find you.)  i try some new complex recipe that my ill-equipped swiss kitchen cannot possibly handle. i grip the wheel of the car really tightly and keep it pointed straight and steady on the road. i phone a friend.

i go for a run.

3. do you feel like a good parent?

does anyone feel like a good parent? how can we? the task is too enormous and we are too weak. if i can figure out how to love my kids the way THEY need to be loved, not the way i want to love them, i'll feel like i haven't entirely failed. i have pretty polite, well-behaved kids. i also have cool, dorky, irritating, creative, cracked, funny, frightened, adaptable, darling, horrible, astonishing kids. how much of that do i get credit for? how much is a lucky accident? how much can i blame on their father? mostly i worry, oh how i worry, that i will turn into my mother, that it's genetically inevitable. someone please destroy me before that happens.

4. kirk or picard?

huh? you realize i didn't grow up in the united states. are we talking star trek? star wars? starship troopers? fuck. picard? he's got the accent, right? yeah. picard.

5. i know you have an iPhone, but do you have a Mac?

i'm typing on my mac book right this very minute. does that count? or does it have to be big and impressive and solidly moored to a desk-like furniture item?

6. so are you coming to blog camp berlin or what?

absofuckinglutely. i hope all you seasoned internationalists can tolerate the newb. "Ich bin ein Berliner." (i just lost fabulous points right there, didn't i?)

7. in connection with that...limoncello or jagermeister?

jagermeister makes me think of a crew-cut woman in an ill-fitting khaki surplus blouse with enormous biceps who barks at me "vere ahr yohr paypahrs?" so, uh, limoncello, please.  straight from the freezer. can i have one right now?

8. so is blogher all it's cracked up to be?

funny. i'm writing this as i fly to blogher, and i wonder what the fuck i'm doing. i cherish the friends i've made from this medium, but the whole SQUEEBLOGHERSHOESSQUEE zeitgeist is, yeah. no. but then i didn't join a sorority for a reason. i think blogher brings out the worst in most people and is actually really really bad for women. but ask me again when it's all over.

(blogher is now over, and i can say definitively that is completely fucking stupid. and i had a fantastic time at it. go fig.)

9. if you could assemble the perfect A-list blogger chick lunch, who would you invite?

what qualifies someone for a-list status?  do you know? i'm not even sure the pool from which i'm allowed to pick.  there were a bunch of women crowded on a couch at the last party at blogher, looking like a washed-up, sagging version of a hollywood hottie party. were they a-list? because if they were, those tedious a-list slags cannot come to my perfect chick lunch.  they are dead dull, and i loathe nothing more than being un-amused. on to the true coolios, then: the on-line peeps i want to know better--Jen, Juli, Mary, Britt, Anna, Sue, Thordora, Bon, Suebob, Amanda, Nadine, Kat. For starters.

10. do you ever think that maybe there is indeed a hell and we're already in it?

nope. there's no hell, not even the kind that grumpy little Sartre postulated, and we're not in it now. this life--as fraught as it is--is too jagged with beauty to truly be hell. it's all we've got, man. there's nothing on the other side.  better find a way to love it while you have it.

* * *

it kinda freaks me out that i only recognize one single blogger on gwen's a-list.

and it freaks me out even more to realize just how much i've lost my edge.

i need to be edgy again.

what the hell happened to me?

thank you gwen, for being brilliant and articulate and edgy.

i really needed that.

and i'm sending a whole bottle of limoncello your way.
or at least bringing one to berlin.

* * *

there are some questions still out there and i will post those as they come in (hint, hint).

* * *

i know there are a whole group of you who asked for questions and never got them
(you're the "no-reply blogger" comments, which made it harder.)
i will be doing this again, but it's time for a break.
but you never know when questions just might pop into your in-box, so hang in there.
a big thank you to all who were interviewed and wanted to be interviewed.
you gave me back my mojo.

* * *

"i loathe nothing more than being unamused." - that's priceless, just priceless.